See How Coca-Cola Did It

Customer highlights:

One developer was able to integrate Twilio with Salesforce and start sending SMSs in a single day

Call center agents no longer have to use a separate system to communicate with technicians in the field, increasing productivity

SMS records are now stored alongside service requests, improving visibility and enhancing record keeping

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When restaurants, supermarkets, cafes, and newspaper stands in Western Europe need service on their Coca-Cola coolers or vending machines, they call Coca-Cola Enterprises. And when Coca-Cola Enterprises needs to send a technician to their most valued customers, they dispatch them the fastest way possible—using Twilio SMS and Salesforce.

A speedy repair and a smile

Coca-Cola Enterprises (CCE) is one of the world’s largest Coca-Cola bottlers. In 2012, CCE manufactured, sold and distributed about 12 billion bottles and cans to more than 170 million consumers in Great Britain, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, Luxembourg and Monaco. All those products are kept ice cold by more than 600,000 coolers and vending machines. Keeping those machines up and running – and providing top-notch service to their customers – is a top priority for CCE.

To better service high-volume locations, CCE’s IT leadership team decided to integrate communications into its field service management application so that agents could communicate with technicians wherever they were.

CCE was already using ServiceMax, a field management solution built on top of Salesforce, to schedule routine service calls. However, the experience left room for improvement. When a high-volume customer needed immediate assistance, agents sometimes had difficulty getting in touch with technicians in the field quickly. Additionally, the team identified an opportunity to make the system more efficient, rather than using separate pieces of software to contact technicians.

An API and a cold Coke

Carl Kennedy, Associate Director of IT Development and George Abboud, Manager, IT Development at CCE, decided to streamline their agents’ experience and improve their efficiency by using Twilio SMS within Salesforce. Twilio offered an easy-to-use API, global SMS coverage, and comprehensive documentation geared towards rapid development. “The speed with which we could do this, plus the ease of implementation, were two of the driving factors for this,” Kennedy said. Abboud said it took about a day to add Twilio.

With the new system, as soon as a call comes in, an agent opens a case in Salesforce, creates a work order, assigns a technician and determines if the call is urgent or routine. If a call is urgent, an agent will click the “Send SMS” button, which opens up an SMS template for the agent to edit and review. A record of the sent SMS is then attached to the existing case. If the problem isn’t quickly resolved, or if a new problem arises at the same location, agents can see the SMS correspondence history at a glance.

After initially testing the system with 250 technicians in Great Britain, CCE is planning to roll it out to 650 technicians throughout Western Europe. Kennedy said he expects the end result will be faster resolution of urgent cases, along with enhanced record keeping and better visibility into the handling of repairs.

Integration and Implementation

Abboud used Salesforce's Apex programming language to add Twilio to Salesforce, creating a new custom object to build the SMS templates for service calls. The user interface was created using Visualforce.

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